Tuesday, July 24, 2007

SuSE 10.2 Give me a break.

All I have to say is SuSE 10.2 isn't very good. I regularly use RHEL/CENTOS 3.x, 4.x and 5.x, and installation, updates and package management is a breeze.

Yast/Yast2 takes forever to do things, and it attempts to be a system-wide control panel, not a package manager.

I installed yum on 10.2 and never needed Yast2 since, but damn this is annoying.

Now for the real kicker. Yast2 allowed the selection of kernel-bigsmp on an x86_64 install, and it gleefully installed that 32-bit/IA32 kernel and wiped out the old default kernel! What the fuck? No I have to go and grab 9 packages or so (who the fuck thinks of breaking the kernel, kernel headers, modules, kernels and sources apart like this?) and manually install them while booted into Knoppix and manually edit grub and then fix up the package issues when I get this piece of shit to boot again.

A note to Novell / SuSE: Fix your fucking package manager so it doesn’t install shit that fucks the whole system up. Thanks.

Right now, I primarily use FreeBSD, Gentoo and Redhat/Centos, with a majority of my "supported/production" work being in Centos. I always hated my sidetracks into Mandrake/WomanDrake, Mandriva/Mandrivel and SuSE/OpenSuSE. This stuff has been a consistent timesink while offering nothing.

Also, AppArmor, this stuff is shit. Yes, I know SELinux is a huge pain in the ass and leads to people just going:

selinux=0 capability=0 capability.disable=1

And this is wrong, but AppArmor. This stuff is the way lazy admins will go and it is crap, its not really a work-alike to SELinux, and it can be easily bypassed.

Anyway, thanks Novell / (more like non-novel) for a shit product no one needs.

Note to the world, if you see:

request_module runaway loop modprobe binfmt-464c or something similar

Then it is most likely a 32 bit kernel on a 64 bit system.

Oh, I like how RPM makes it hard to find arch once the packages are installed. That’s nice. (yum front ends this nicely). rpm -qa shows package names with no arch info. Stupid. You can use RPM on Knoppix by saying : rpm -dbpath to your system you are trying to rescue. Kind of useful.

Also, making usb bootables (key flash pen jump Thumb-Drive, why assholes call these things 90 different names is beyond me) and installing over the network with SuSE is a bigger pain in the ass, and the damn SuSE keeps asking for CDs and DVDs from time to time which is asinine.

Oh, and SuSE, the boot.local sucks, there is no easy place to put after everything is done for the runlevel, run this, so I had to make a file for rc.d and do all this fancy shit to make it run last and activate it through chkconfig. What a fucking pain in the ass.

Also, SuSE shows these fucking gay non-LANG=C characters all over the place. I wish this internationalization shit was totally fucking off and gone by default. I remember Solaris asks on version 8 or 9, do you want normal C ASCII text, or all this fucking shit that came after it and fucked everything up? Anyways, between i18n, ncurses, terminal types, and /etc/sysconfig/fonts-config , /etc/sysconfig/console, and stupid non-working frame buffer modes (I wish vga=extended was the default for all these distros) which scroll slow as ass, the world of plain Using plain English in *nix has gotten WORSE, not better and the C language has English syntax, what the fuck?

Also, what the fuck is with distros burying the sources and being cute with this shit? Cant we just get the /usr/src/linux directory symlinked to the actual pile of shit that is the kernel, as in, go into the kernel directory and if you ran make install, it would overwrite exactly all the files installed via the package. Then for the 40 kernels that exist , you can just move the symlink to the running kernel and all these stupid nvidia, cisco vpn and 3rd party drivers would find all the shit they needed without this constant shit. On SuSE I had to make oldconfig for the kernel to be useful.

make oldconfig , make prepare, make, make modules (vestigal in 2.6)

Oh, and the final thing. Asshole linux repackagers, listen up. Stop modularizing the shit out of BASIC stuff like sata and PATA drivers. What the FUCK are you thinking, when the shit hits the fan, if the kernel has the storage modules inside of it, rather than a module, then you actually not have to get Knoppix to fix shit. Assholes. I know the whole entire gigantic library of drivers would be a pain, but OpenBSD and FreeBSD generic kernels boot any random shit, but linux vendor packaged kernels have this fucking fetish for initrd/piles of modules that is just getting fucking old. Give me a real reason why to try and take shit out of the "base" kernel and shovel it into modules? The compatibility problems by having two drivers that may not like each other in the kernel together is FAR outweighed by the pain in the ass these initrds are to make if you need to get into the system real bad.